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Saturday, September 24, 2016

I'll pay $100 to the first person to reach me with the Letter of William S. Hubbard to "Dear Father," June 25, 1864. Hubbard belonged to the 16th Virginia Infantry. His letter describes his role in Mahone's attack on II Corps June 22, 1864.I have seen this letter cited to Petersburg National Battlefield Park, but the response I have received from the park is that the letter is not there.

Saturday, September 17, 2016

It is clear that Lt. Col. G. Moxley Sorrel led the flank attack of May 6, 1864 in the Wilderness. Brig. Gen. William Mahone, the ranking officer involved. later claimed credit for the attack but all the evidence points to Sorrel as the leader of the attack. Sorrel was on the staff of Longstreet's Corps.

On June 23, 1864, the evidence points to Capt. Victor Jean Baptiste Girardey as the officer who led the Florida Brigade of Mahone's Division into position to cut off part of the Vermont Brigade of VI Corps near the Gurley House south of Petersburg. Col. David Lang, the commander of the brigade, later claimed he led the brigade's attack, but the division commander, Mahone, vouched for Girardey. Maybe we can harmonize these accounts by saying that Girardey led the Florida Brigade into position and Lang led the attack. Girardey was on the staff of Mahone's Division.

A similar situation arose on July 30, 1864. Girardey led the Virginia Brigade of Mahone's Division into position to attack at The Crater. Girardey gave the order to attack while in front of the left of the brigade. Colonel David Addison Weisiger, commander of the Virginia Brigade, may have given the order to attack while in front of the right of the brigade. He certainly claimed to have done so. Girardey had long since died, on August 16, 1864 to be exact.

On the whole, the evidence supports the staff officers over the field and general officers. Girardey may have been the finest divisional staff officer of the war. He was promoted to brigadier general after The Crater and died shortly afterward at Second Deep Bottom, August 16, 1864. He may have been the actual leader of Wright's Georgia Brigade at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863.

Sometimes,
despite the confusion of battle (particularly in woods), it is possible to
identify the particular enemy regiment or regiments opposing the 12th Virginia
or a portion thereof in a given fight. The
Petersburg Regiment compared very favorably with the average Union regiment,
which lost about five percent. It often
met some of the best regiments in the Federal army, yet compared favorably with
some of them as well.

*
Meets criterion for inclusion in Fox’s Fighting 300 Regiments (130 or 10%
killed or died of wounds).

#
Lost a flag to the 12th Virginia that day.

+
Lost two flags to the 12th Virginia that day.

[1] My figures come from Fox, Regimental Losses; Samuel P. Bates, History
of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861-5, Prepared in Compliance with Acts of the
Legislature (5 Volumes) (Harrisburg, 1869); and Frederick Phisterer, New York in the War of the Rebellion (5
Volumes) (Albany, 1912).

Saturday, September 3, 2016

Unless Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant or Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman succeeded in capturing or destroying at least one of their objectives (Richmond, the Army of Northern Virginia, Atlanta, or the Army of Tennessee) by November, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln could scarcely hope to win re-election. If Lincoln met with defeat, the country could
expect its then current division to become permanent. A Democrat would occupy the White House who
would, in Lincoln’s words, “have secured his election on such ground that he
could not possibly save [the Union].”[1]

No one had done more than Lincoln himself
to create this predicament. Earlier that
year, before the president appointed Grant general-in-chief of the Union’s
armies, Grant had intended to begin the Campaign of 1864 in the east by
transporting his army by sea to Suffolk, Virginia. He would thus have arrived bloodlessly at a
position similar to his present one, which had cost more than 72,000 casualties
to reach.[2] From Suffolk, he would have headed inland along
the Blackwater River against the railroads connecting Richmond with the Deep South. Lincoln had objected to Grant’s plan because
a move by sea would leave Washington unprotected, something the president’s party
could not tolerate.[3] Such a move would create another problem for
Lincoln. It would admit the correctness
of Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan’s bloodless move by sea to the York-James
Peninsula in 1862, though McClellan’s campaign there had ended in failure and
mutual recriminations. Such an admission
would never do, because the 1864 presidential election was shaping up as a
contest between Old Abe and Little Mac.

Lincoln had also meddled in the Campaign
of 1864 in the west by insisting on the Red River Expedition into northwest
Louisiana. This deprived Sherman of
about 10,000 soldiers he was counting on for the beginning of his campaign in north
Georgia.[4] It also precluded an expedition aimed at
Mobile that would have tied up enemy troops sent to defend Atlanta.[5] Against a more capable opponent than Gen.
Joseph E. Johnston, Sherman’s campaign might never have gotten going.[6] Denied about 10,000 more troops on veteran
furloughs, Sherman had to reduce the scope of his plans in a manner that
significantly slowed the progress of his campaign.[7]

In the furor over the casualties incurred
as a result of the change of plans in the east that Lincoln had foisted on
Grant, most of the criticism fell upon the general-in-chief. His nickname of “Unconditional Surrender,”
based on his initials and earned at Fort Donelson—his first great victory—changed
to “Unceasing Slaughter” during his gory progress from the Rapidan to the
James. That Grant never complained about the
Rail-Splitter’s meddling, and just kept going forward, forged a bond of absolute
loyalty between Lincoln and his general-in chief.

[2] Grant’s casualties came to
approximately 72,526. He had lost about
54,926 in the Overland Campaign. General
summary from the Rapidan to the James River, May 5-June 24, 1864, War of the
Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official
Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 70 vols. in 128 parts (Washington, D.C., 1880-1901) Series 1, 36,
1:188 (cited hereinafter asOR,
with no series indicated unless it is other than Series 1. He had lost around 11,386 in his assaults on
Petersburg. Edward H. Bonekemper,
III. A Victor, Not a Butcher: Ulysses S. Grant's Overlooked Military
Genius (Washington, D.C., 2004), 313.
During May, the Army of the James lost approximately 6,214, which I
include in Grant’s losses. Return of Casualties in the Union Forces,
commanded by Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, U. S. Army (compiled from nominal
lists of casualties, returns, &c.), May 5-31, OR 36, 2:18; Return of Casualties in the Union Forces,
commanded by Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, U. S. Army, June 1-14, OR 36,
2:19.

[3] U. S. Grant, Major-General, to Maj.-Gen.
H. W. Halleck, General-in-Chief of the Army, January 19, 1864, OR 33:394-395; William Glenn Robertson, Back Door to Richmond: The Bermuda Hundred Campaign, April-June 1864
(Cranbury, N.J., 1987), 13-14; John Horn, The Petersburg Campaign: June
1864-April 1865 (Conshohocken, Pa., 1993), 12-13; Richard M. McMurry, Atlanta 1865: Last Chance for the Confederacy (Lincoln,
Neb., 2000), 12. For the case in favor
of a movement by sea against Richmond’s communications, see William Swinton, Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac, A
Critical History of Operations in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania from the
Commencement to the Close of the War, 1861-1865 (New York, 1882),
406-409. For the case against a movement
by sea against Richmond’s communications, see Andrew A. Humphreys, The Virginia Campaign of ’64 and ’65: The Army of the Potomac and the Army of the
James (New York, 1883), 7-9. Grant’s
memoirs, which include his official report in the appendix to vol. 2, fail to
mention this matter. U. S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (2 vols.)
(New York, 1886), 2:124-145, 555-632.

[6] The record shows that Gen. Pierre
Gustave Toutant “Gus” Beauregard, though he had no better relations with
Confederate President Jefferson Davis than Johnston, offered a better
choice. Unlike Johnston, who had
scarcely tried to relieve Vicksburg during the summer of 1863, Beauregard had
successfully defended Charleston. In the
spring of 1864, while Johnston steadily retired toward Atlanta, Beauregard gave
battle to Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler and bottled him up in Bermuda Hundred,
then successfully defended Petersburg against assaults by first Butler and
afterward Grant. At times during August
1864, Beauregard counterattacked the Unionists as effectively as Gen. Robert E.
Lee. See John Horn, The Siege of Petersburg: The
Battles for the Weldon Railroad, August 1864 (El Dorado Hills, Ca., 2015), 179-183,
290, 293.

The problem for Davis lay in that if Beauregard had
defended Atlanta, who would have defended Petersburg other than Johnston? In that case, the Cockade City could expect,
like Atlanta, to fall into Federal hands and take Richmond along with it before
the November election.

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About Me

A native of Illinois, John Horn received a B.A. in English and Latin from New College (Sarasota, Florida) in 1973 and a J.D. from Columbia Law School in 1976. He has practiced law in the Chicago area since graduation, occasionally holding local public office, and living in Oak Forest with his wife and law partner, H. Elizabeth Kelley, a native of Richmond, Virginia. They have three children. He and his wife travel to the Old Dominion each year to visit relatives, battlefields, and various archives. He has published articles in Civil War Times, Illustrated and America's Civil War, and his books include The Destruction of the Weldon Railroad and The Petersburg Campaign. With Hampton Newsome (author of Richmond Must Fall) and Dr. John G. Selby (author of Virginians at War), Horn co-edited Civil War Talks: The Further Reminiscences of George S. Bernard & His Fellow Veterans.